structural bias

The Myth of the Individual

The primacy of the individual is an article of faith in the American civil religion.  This idea manifests itself in all sorts of places, from popular entertainment to political discourse; it’s so deeply ingrained that it inflects how we think about, well, essentially everything.  Our stories are about the one person (usually, the one man) who made a difference.  We love accounts of this or that hardworking person escaping poverty and becoming successful, living “the American dream.”  We idolize individual leaders like Washington and Lincoln and Kennedy and, if we’re stupid, Reagan.  We talk about encouraging personal responsibility.

And all of this is not only a deeply misguided way of looking at the world, but hinders us in making real improvements.

Our thoughts, beliefs and actions do not spring, fully-formed, into being by our sheer will, devoid of all precedent and influence; neither do they take place in a vacuum, with no reverberatory effects reinforcing this cultural notion or challenging that one.  Who we are, and what we think and do, is not fully determined, but is predisposed to a great degree, by both our personal, individual history and the sociohistorical context in which we exist.  (One notable effect of this is the implicit bias phenomenon, and it’s telling that when people recognize their implicit bias and consciously try to counteract it, things improve; but if they simply deny being biased, nothing does.)

This is why it can be so difficult to get even people who identify as “liberal” to recognize that problems like racism, sexism and homophobia are not mainly a matter of individuals holding unpleasant attitudes toward other individuals because of their race, gender or orientation, but are rather large-scale structures that must be addressed in a systemic way.  If tomorrow every white person woke up truly free from prejudice against black people, every man woke up truly free from prejudice against women, and every heterosexual person woke up truly free from prejudice against homosexual and bisexual people, our society would still be (though, we might hope, it would begin to change much more rapidly) a racist, sexist, homophobic society, because the structures would still exist: the wealth and power would still be concentrated in the hands of heterosexual (or closeted) white men.  Merely for those in privileged positions to begin treating the underprivileged fairly, as though there were no relevant history, and it were appropriate to use now as the baseline for measuring fairness, is like claiming a race is fair because no one cheats, even though one runner’s starting line was a mile behind the other’s.

The Myth of the Individual tells us that as long as the runner with the shorter distance to travel isn’t actively hindering the runner with the longer distance, and didn’t him- or herself set up the track, the race is fair.

We are not unconstrained by our sociohistorical context.  We cannot be; and we certainly cannot choose to be.  It is not a question of will.  And insofar as we refuse to recognize this, and continue to fetishize individual choice, individual action, individual attitudes, individual will, even those of us who consider ourselves “liberal” fail to effectively confront the conservative project.  As Kai Chang has very eloquently said, our society, with all its inequity and injustice, is “an edifice with foundations, load-bearing walls, plumbing, wiring, ductwork; and in order to renovate, you need to study those structures.”  To focus on the individual is to look at this structure and try to “renovate” by filling cracks in the plaster with toothpaste, hastily putting up a new coat of paint, and buying a throw rug.  This not only fails to make major changes, but in fact supports the existing structure by tacitly acknowledging it as legitimate.

And yet, the foundations are rotten.

Why I Am Not a Revolutionary

Many writers and thinkers I respect a great deal argue that the extant social order — which is in bell hooks’s terms white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy — is hopelessly morally corrupt and must be ended.  I agree with this, in fact.  The inhumanity of our system is evident; thus clearly it must be changed.  However, it’s common for these people with whom I agree (Twisty Faster is a good example) to hold that because this hopelessly morally corrupt social order is extant, and being hegemonic will not only fight to preserve itself, but has access to virtually limitless resources in order to do so1, it is functionally impossible to reform, and must instead be overthrown by revolution.  And there, I do disagree.

First, I want to emphasize that it’s the conclusion I disagree with: the idea that the solution is revolution.  It is certainly true that the extant social order is very, very difficult to change.  But I reject revolution, as I’ll explain, on the grounds that it’s a cure worse than the disease.

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Quick Hit: Cambridge Phelps-a-Thon

Apparently Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church  (sic) will be protesting in Cambridge, MA in a couple of weeks, over the continuing existence of a Gay-Straight Alliance at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.  This is close to home: I live only a few miles from there, and a good friend of mine went to Rindge.  The gall of these terrible people bringing their hatred here is astonishing, and it makes me very angry.

If you’re angry too, and you can spare some  money, please consider the Phelps-a-thon, which I think is one of the more effective counters to the WBC.  Phelps wants attention; he wants shouting matches with counterprotesters and even altercations, because that raises his profile.  Better to calmly display to him a sign showing how much money he’s raised so far for the causes he hates.

AG Holder and the Race Speech

Yesterday, Eric Holder — the country’s first Black Attorney General — gave a speech to DoJ employees in honor of Black History Month.  (AP Story; Text of remarks.)  The thing that’s been getting particular attention (though, actually, less than I might have expected; perhaps people are just really too busy paying attention to, you know, the ongoing catastrophic meltdown of the world economy) is mainly this line:

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

Before I continue to talk about this, I’m going to go off on a tangent for a little bit, because it’s my blog, and I can do that.

It seems to me that “the race speech” is an expected rite of passage for PoC politicians and other public figures in America.  The person of color, having unsettled white America by ascending to a position of power, must give a thoughtful, nuanced, and above all eloquent speech on the subject of race, confirming in the minds of those unsettled that he or she is, after all, exceptional (and thus not a genuine threat to the extant social order), and reassuring them that everyone bears a share of the responsibility for ongoing racial problems in America (and thus they, on behalf of white people, aren’t being accused of racism) — which anyway are of course much less bad than they were, and really can be solved by everyone making little, painless adjustments in their everyday behavior.

If it’s not abundantly clear how much is wrong with that, on how many different levels, then I’m not sure how to make it more clear.  Let me point out, by the way, that this is not a criticism of the PoC public figures placed in this position, or any kind of claim to know what’s in their minds with respect to these speeches and their effects; nor indeed to suggest that the above is necessarily a reasonable reception for such speeches — only that I think this is how they are generally received by white America.

It is not the responsibility of those who have suffered centuries of oppression at the hands of others, and who continue to be disadvantaged by the social and economic structures and norms that developed during those centuries, to help those who have benefited from oppressing them, and who continue to benefit from those same inequitable social and economic structures and norms to feel better about themselves and their history.  So suggest that it is, as the expectation of the race speech implicitly does, is nothing less than insane.  (I suppose it also supports Holder’s point: that we are indeed cowardly on this topic.)

All right, back to the subject at hand: AG Holder’s actual speech.  I think it’s a good speech, and I think he’s right about a lot of things; though I also think he gives too little attention to ongoing structural problems, I understand the political reasons for treading lightly around those.  Perhaps, if enough Americans take this speech seriously and act on it, we will finally begin to be able to approach these issues with more maturity, and honestly own up to the things that are wrong.  (After all, if we don’t claim them, they aren’t ours to fix.)  But Holder raises a lot of very important, and I think correct, points.

Both Rachel S.’s take at Alas! and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (which has the MSNBC video of the speech embedded) are worthwhile reading.  Coates’s criticisms are intriguing to me (I don’t think I agree with them, though) — in some ways, I’d say the speech’s boringness, its workaday matter-of-factness, is actually a strength.  The Attorney  General’s delivery serves this purpose well, too.  He’s not a fiery, electrifying or inspiring orator like the President is; he’s not exhorting or demanding, he’s just saying how things are and what needs to be done.

I’m going to end here.  Ultimately, I don’t know how comfortable I am taking on the role of yet another white guy declaiming about race: white people shouldn’t get to set the terms of this debate.  So these are just my first-draft, rough-cut opinions, with some links to thinks I think worth reading, and I’m happy to be disagreed with.

Nothing is "Just a Game"

A lot has been written, and I expect a lot more will be written, about Resident Evil 5.  IGN published a column insisting that it’s not really racist; Eurogamer wrote that of course it’s racist and gamers and the gaming press need to confront it if we want to have any credibility for our claims that games deserve to be taken seriously as an artistic medium.

Penny Arcade addresses the issue today.  As often happens, the comic went up before the news post, and I was very concerned, without the context provided by the latter, that the former was an attempt to, like IGN, deride the criticisms of the game’s imagery.  I’m very glad to see, in reading the post, that that isn’t the direction Tycho was going.  I could have hoped he’d spend more time seriously engaging the racism and what’s wrong with it, but since I was concerned that he’d join much of the gaming press in simply insisting it was no big deal, I’m happy he is in fact taking it seriously.  He links to an interview at MTV’s Multiplayer blog with N’Gai Croal, who writes for Newsweek, which I think is worth your time to read.  And I think Tycho’s closing paragraph does a good job articulating the change of perspective I hope the discussion of this game provokes in at least some young gamers:

It’s sort of like those Magic Eye pictures. You can’t see it, you can’t see it, and then bam. All you can see is the genocide.

One final note (as it were) that particularly pleased me about the news post: be sure to mouse over the small, italicized epigraph at the bottom of Tycho’s post.

I thought I was going to have more to say about RE5, when I started writing this post: I didn’t mean it to just be about Penny Arcade’s response.  But, it turns out, I find the whole situation — both the fact1 of the game’s racism and the impassioned defense of the game being mounted from many corners of the gaming world: a defense which, given the aforementioned fact, genuinely cannot be perceived as anything but pro-racist — tiring and depressing.  RE5 is unabashedly, violently racist, and uncritically, unironically2 portrays the wholesale slaughter of black Africans by a white American as heroic.  How there can be any debate over whether it’s a “good game” or whether it’s “worth playing” in the face of that, let alone any debate over whether that’s an accurate characterization, is beyond me.

1 Yes, fact. There really is no room for interpretation here.
2 No, “but, see, it’s ironic!” wouldn’t be any kind of defense; I’m not advocating hipster racism. I just want to highlight the apparent complete lack of awareness on the part of the developers that anyone might find blatantly racist, pro-genocide imagery offensive.

Implicit Bias

It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing about it, unfortunately, but there was what I think was a very important article in Scientific American back in May about “implicit bias” — unconscious prejudices we all have, no matter how enlightened we think we are, and which affect our day-to-day behavior in ways we generally don’t notice.  Perhaps I’ve just missed it, but I feel like there was woefully insufficient recognition and discussion of the significance of this report (so there’s an additional mea culpa for my being so late in writing about it).

The key findings of this study, assuming I’m understanding the SciAm article correctly, are that these prejudices largely match stereotypes common in the culture; that they are generally things that, individually, seem quite small, rather than big, blatant, overtly hateful ideas; that even people who don’t consider themselves prejudiced do in fact display these biases; that denying the bias doesn’t reduce the degree to which it affects one’s behavior; and that acknowledging and being aware of the bias does.

Why does this seem so important to me?  Because this is (roughly) how liberals have always said prejudice works, and it’s not how conservatives think it works.  This is yet another example of reality’s well-known liberal bias, and it shows why (to take racism in particular as an example) “colorblindness,” high-dudgeon objections to “the race card” and attacks on affirmative action are not only based on a misguided understanding of the nature of prejudice, but actually work to reinforce prejudice, by silencing efforts to point it out and discuss it openly.

To my knowledge, the liberal/progressive view of prejudice has always held that it’s a systemic problem, reinforced by social norms and inculcated unconsciously, and only enforced by overt, ugly, violent hate at the very extremes — that to think of “racism” as being epitomized by the KKK missed the point entirely.  And the conservative view, by contrast, holds that prejudice is only that explicit hatred demonstrated by fringe hate groups, that bias is a characteristic of certain twisted individuals who make up those groups and not at all a trait embedded in the fabric of society.  So on the conservative view, to point out perceived bias is just an attempt by “special interest groups” to garner attention and guilt-trip society into awarding them special privileges; and if everyone stopped claiming to see prejudice everywhere, and thereby making people think about it, there wouldn’t be any more prejudice, because Americans are naturally fair-minded, and all those nasty extremist hate groups would just fade away into obscurity.

But as the SciAm article makes clear, that’s just not true at all, while the liberal view is pretty close to reality; and behaving according to the conservative view — discouraging any discussion of bias in the hopes that if ignored, those nasty prejudiced people (who of course aren’t us) will just go away — actually reinforces and encourages societal prejudice.

Surely I’m not the only one who sees how important this is; it’s very strange to me that I’ve seen so little discussion of it on other liberal blogs.  Many differences between conservatives and liberals are essentially matters of opinion, on which reasonable people can disagree, wherein each side seems “clearly” right if you accept their set of starting assumptions, and “clearly” wrong if you accept the other side’s (yes, of course, this “liberal vs. conservative” two-sides construction is a gross oversimplification).  This issue is no longer one of them, however.  One view — as it happens, the conservative one — is in fact simply, demonstrably, factually incorrect.

Our Impoverished Discourse, Our Impoverished Thought

This will, I expect, be the first of many posts on, or related to, this topic; so here I’m not really going to do more than sketch out some ideas.I’m not a big believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least not as I think it’s commonly understood — not in its reductive, absolutist formulation — but on the other hand it seems plain that the way we talk about things and the way we think about things are closely connected, and the one can influence the other. (more…)

Four Decades of Mourning

Forty years ago last Friday, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, capping off five awful years of murdered political and civil rights leaders.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live through those years — but I don’t need to imagine the long years of cynicism and hopelessness that followed, because I’ve lived three-quarters of them.  To have the promise of real, positive change so violently cut down so many times must have felt as though some malign force beyond mortal ken were deliberately crushing all hope for a better future.  It’s no wonder conspiracy theories sprung up; but the explanation I find both more plausible and more terrifying than some notion of a shadowy cabal manipulating the levers of power is this: that American society up to and in the 1960s was (and, to a greater extent than many of us would like to think, still is) so hidebound, so racist, so terrified of change, and that certain strains of conservative thought, capitalist/anti-communist ideology, violent nativism, heroic mythology and valorization of vigilantism, and anti-intellectual populism are so deeply woven into American culture, that in the face of attempts to bring about radical change in the social system — even in ways that in the short run will hurt only those who enjoy unearned privileges at others’ expense, and in the long run work to everyone’s benefit — individuals willing to commit acts of violence, murder and terrorism in the name of preserving an oppressive status quo will arise organically, and communities will be willing to tolerate or turn a blind eye to them.

(It’s true that this is not really a good explanation for RFK’s assassination, as Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian who was angry over Kennedy’s support for Israel in the Six-Day War, or mentally disturbed, or both.  He had lived in the US since the age of 12, so he very likely absorbed something of these cultural traits, but a twelve-year-old, though impressionable, is also already pretty strongly enculturated.  But even if the motivations of the assassin himself do not fit the pattern of the previous five years, the assassination, and its cultural repercussions, fit all too well.)

The title of this post, then, is meant to suggest not that we have been in mourning specifically for RFK for forty years — but for the radical hope of the ’60s, to which the final deathblow seemed to have been delivered on June 5th, 1968. (more…)